Train a horse

What's Really Wrong
With Your Horse?

 

It's pretty easy to train a horse without pain - in other words, if he's in pain, it's harder to train him.

So, we want to eliminate pain before training.  That's an important horse training principle.  Often, people don't consider the pain issue in horses.

So here's the question.

When your horse acts up, do you know what's "really" wrong?

Is he just being a jerk?

Is he fearful?

Does he just not know what you want?

How do you tell?

Truth is, it's not always easy diagnosing what the problem is.

If you're seasoned, you can figure it out fairly quickly.

But here's a few insights that'll help you.

First, if your horse acts up but it's out of character...then you can pretty much rule out he's being a jerk or that it's a typical behavior thing.

It "could" be fear. To check, look at his body language. Is his head up on high alert? Is he tense? Is he nervous? Does he snort more than normal? Is he not calm?

If he acts up but you know he knows what to do because he's done it lots of times, then he knows what you want.

One of the problems is maybe he's done what you're asking too much and he's sick of it.

He could also just be having a bad day. That happens. A horse may just be a horse, but a horse has bad days just like you and I.

Sometimes, you just have to leave the horse alone if he's having a bad day. But if he's having a lot of bad days in a row, then you might be looking at behavioral problem.

But...

There's something to consider.

Is your horse in pain?

This is so often overlooked, most people don't give it a second thought.

If your horse is in pain, it can be very dangerous for you.

Here's why.

It's fairly common for the uninitiated to make a horse work through something.

There are those people who will work a horse through a bucking problem but hadn't considered that he may be bucking from pain.

If a horse's back is in pain and he can hardly stand to have the weight on his back, his only defense is to get it off of him.

Thus...bucking.

After all, he can't turn around, look at you and say, "Look,...my back is hurting today. Could you NOT do that!?!"

Instead, he may buck.

One of the tricks is to be a good observer of your horse. If he's out of character, I'd look for the pain issue before anything.

And get this.

Just because pain appears in one part of the body, doesn't mean that's where the pain is.

Think about this.

If the left side of your right foot has a sore on it (say, in the arch area), you'll try not to walk on that part of your foot, right?

So...you walk on the outside of your right foot.

That soon makes the right side of your foot hurt. Before you know it, now your foot, leg, and hip are in pain.

The funny thing is...the pain is "really" in the arch of your right foot.

So how do you figure out where the horse hurts?

Well...it isn't easy.

It comes down to learning about horses and their nature, observations, knowledge of what causes what, and so on.

And if you're stumped and need help, just call a vet.

The big thing I want you to get out of this is to be careful not to try and ride a horse through a behavior unless you're certain it's just a behavior thing.

If it's a pain thing, you're asking for trouble. You could riding a box of dynamite and it can explode so fast you wouldn't know what happened.

Not trying scare you...just want you to be careful.